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Friday, April 26, 2013

Sandra Steingraber was released from the Chemung County Jail at 12:01 am Thursday morning. Later that day she told environmental activists, "Don't be afraid of jail." Before she was released, she wrote one last letter, which she says is a Message to Fellow Mothers:

My book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of
Environmental Crisis, was released in paperback this week. But, being in jail,
I was unable to grant interviews or otherwise to participate in its promotion.
That’s not a situation that book publicists appreciate, although mine is being
very good about it. But, being in here, I feel that I am walking my words.

The fundamental message of Raising Elijah is that the
environmental crisis is a crisis of family life, as it robs parents of our
ability to carry out our two most basic duties: to protect our children from
harm and to provide for their future. When inherently toxic chemicals –
including developmental toxicants linked to asthma, birth defects and learning
disabilities – are legally allowed to freely circulate in our children’s
environment, we can’t protect them. When heat trapping greenhouse gases create
extreme weather events that slash the world’s grain harvests (this is
happening) and acidify the oceans in ways that threaten the entire marine food
chain, starting with plankton (and this is happening too), then we can’t plan
for our kids’ futures – no matter how much we sock away in their college funds
or Tiger Mom them into athletic or musical mastery.

This crisis requires our urgent attention. And by attention,
I mean sustained political action, not intermittent, private worrying. Hence,
unless the kids can get there and back, under their own steam,then piano
lessons, karate, Little League, play practice, SAT prep, and Scout meetings are
cancelled until further notice. Ditto for yoga, date night, and book club (with
apologies to my long-suffering publicist).

Look, one in every four mammal species is headed for
extinction. The world’s available drinking water is becoming less and less
available. Insect pollinators, which provide us one-sixth to one-third of the
food we eat, are in trouble. The price index for 33 different basic commodities
is rising, and financial analysts are predicting shortages of the kind that
lead to social unrest. Meanwhile, the world’s leading and most powerful
industry is preparing to blow up the nation’s bedrock and frack out the last
wisps and drops of gas and oil – releasing inherently toxic chemicals into our
communities to do so.

In short, we don’t have time for out-of-town sporting
events. Consider this commentary in the preeminent science journal, Nature:

I have yet to meet a climate scientist who does not believe
that global warming is a worse problem that they thought a few years ago. The
seriousness of this change is not appreciated by politicians and the public. .
.Recognition of the facts is delayed by
the frankly brilliant propaganda and obfuscation delivered by energy interests
that virtually own the US Congress . . . This is not only the crisis of your
lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence. I implore you to be
brave. (Nature, 491, Nov. 15, 2012)

The author, Jeremy Grantham, was speaking to the world’s
scientists, but his message is equally applicable to mothers and fathers.
Consider that the World Health Organization has identified climate change as
the number one threat to public health for people born today. Otherwise known
as our kids.

Now, do you have time to participate in a civil rights–style
uprising? Protecting our kids, making sure they have a future: it seems to be a
basis part of our job description.

I am here in the Chemung County Jail on a charge of
trespassing as a result of blockading a compressor station site belonging to
the nation’s largest gas transportation and storage company. Inergy’s plan is
to compress, liquify, and store fracked gases from out of state in depleted
salt caverns under Seneca Lake, the largest and deepest of New York State’s
eleven Finger Lakes. This practice has led to catastrophic results in other
states – including explosions and collapses. Even now, Inergy itself is
chronically out of compliance with the maximum legal limits for its chemical
discharges into this lake, which is the source of drinking water for 100,000
people.

This compressor station, which is less than 20 miles upwind
from my house, is just one piece of fracking infrastructure among millions. I
chose to take a stand here both because Inergy’s plans represent a direct risk
to my children’s air quality and safety, and because my son was born nearby.
The west shore of Seneca Lake is his birthplace, and the sound of green frogs
twanging in the night was the theme song for my labor and delivery.

So, yes, my course of political action has taken me away
from my own children in an attempt to redress this problem on their behalf, and
during the first five days, when I was kept in 24-hour lock-up, I had no access
to them. But I am convinced the tears of my children now will be less than
their tears later – along with the tears of my grandchildren – if we mothers do
nothing and allow the oil, coal, and gas companies to hurdle us all off the
climate cliff.

I’m also aware that human rights movements throughout
history – from abolition to suffrage to civil rights – included many people who
were parents of young children. They were surely just as busy as you and me.
They, like I, probably also kept a list labeled, “Things to do before going to
jail.” Their list, like mine, probably included: making meal plans, paying
bills, cleaning the bathroom, and finding a costume for the school play.

To fight against Hitler, anti-fascist partisans sent their
children away to safe places in case they were betrayed. They were busy
parents, too. They loved their children just as much as we do. The difference
is: now there is no safe place for our children. We can’t hide them from the
ravages of climate change.

And here are two observations from the inside: the jails are
already full of mothers. Every single woman on my cell block has kids. One of
them is trying, from behind bars, to find her son a kidney because he desperately
needs one. That’s hard to do from a pay phone, but she’s doing it. And yet,
what do you suppose Marlene (not her real name) spoke about with me as we
walked around and around the walled-off, barbed-wire rec area at 6:35AM this
morning? The same thing that mothers throughout New York State are talking
about this morning – how our kids are handling the state testing. Last week was
ELA. This week is math.

The mothers in jail are fierce and proud. When the male
guards insult them, they insult back. Their voices echo down the corridor,
penetrate the iron doors, walls, carry messages through the heating vents and,
when they can, out the windows. When Stingray cussed out a guard for demanding
she remove a towel from her face while sleeping, she received six days in “the
box.” So she told me while we were all lined up against the wall to head out
for rec. An hour later, when the guard ordered us to line up and come in, she
did not walk meekly to the door. Instead she ran the other direction and then,
in a stunning gymnastic display, turned a whirling series of cartwheels,
round-offs and flips, landing – Olympic-champion style – at the guard’s feet.
Stingray has two kids and is six months pregnant with the third.

Imagine what we mothers could do if we brought that spirit
of loud, uncompromising, creative defiance to the necessary project of
dismantling the fossil fuel industry and emancipating renewable energy, which
is its hostage? Imagine hundreds and hundreds of mothers peacefully blockading
the infrastructure projects of the fossil fuel industry, day after day. Imagine
us, all unafraid, filling jails across the land. Imagine the press conferences
we would give upon our release. Imagine us living up to our children’s belief
in us as super heroes.

As Stingray shouted down the vent to another inmate
yesterday, “You know I’m loud. My words are my magic.”

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Three protesters of conscience - Melissa Chipman, Michael Dineen, and
Sandra Steingraber - gained their freedom in the wee hours of
midnight/morning. They were released from custody a little after
midnight in front of the "Public Safety Building" - no irony intended, given that they were arrested for protesting what they see as a very unsafe situation: Inergy's proposed natural gas/propane storage facility in the salt caverns edging Seneca Lake.

Today at 1 pm the three returned to Seneca Lake to talk about their experiences. "I come out reforged and rejuvenated for the fight ahead," said Steingraber. Seneca Lake serves as a drinking water source for 100,000 people. Inergy's project puts that at risk: risk of leaks, risk of explosions, risks of air pollutants. Furthermore, the company is not in compliance and has experienced two brine spills in the past three years. "But I don't see anyone from Inergy wearing an orange jump suit!"

All three were arrested from trespassing when they protested in March against Inergy's planned storage plant. But, who are the trespassers here? they asked. The people who live in this community? Or an out-of-town company that hides crucial information and engages in bad (polluting) behavior?

The three protesters, part of a larger group calling themselves the Seneca 12, tried all legal channels they could to halt what they see as a travesty happening on the lake. And once you've followed all those avenues and had no answers, what's left? asked Steingraber.

Dineen, an organic farmer, sees himself as just an ordinary person. We can write letters, he said, attend rallies, make comments. But when these don't work we have to turn to blunt instruments, like standing in front of a gate. "I'm going to defend my land, my family, and my granddaughter's future," he said.

You get a lot of time to think, in a jail, notes Sandra. In this letter she sends a message to her fellow cancer survivors.

As everyone knows, being booked into jail involves rites of
passage: mug shots and fingerprints. What you may not know is that being
fingerprinted no longer involves ink and paper. Like everything else, including
the mug shot, this ritual has been digitized. The booking officer first rubs
your fingers with a sequence of baby wipes and then splays them onto the glass
plate of a scanner. Voilà! There they are, many times larger than life:
facsimiles of your fingertips floating in the computer monitor. A series of
happy electronic chirps means the pictures are keepers; a single beep means
re-do (and out come the baby wipes again).

Meanwhile, you stare transfixed at your own disembodied
black-and-white fingers, hailing you from behind the screen – their contours,
whorls, and ridges, all familiar and alien at the same moment. And then it hits
you: how exactly like looking at one’s own breasts on a mammogram! Only this
time: you already know the length of your sentence; it’s far shorter than
having cancer, and it doesn’t involve the possibility of death.

Here’s another difference – when the booking officer has to
retake the image, he actually says F*CK, whereas the radiology technician –
whose level of loving kindness roughly approximates Chemung County’s deputies –
says things like, “The doctor wants another shot. Lean forward. Take a breath
and hold it.” Which is less reassuring than F*CK.

I’m incarcerated in the Chemung County Jail for trespassing
at a compressor station site on the banks of Seneca Lake, where the nation’s
largest energy storage and transportation corporation seeks to store the
vaporous products of fracking – methane, butane, propane – in abandoned salt
mines under the lake. If Inergy, LLC has its way, my tranquil Finger Lakes home
will be turned into the fracked gas storage and transportation hub of the
entire Northeast. For my act of civil disobedience, which involved blockading
this site with eleven other residents, I received a 15-day sentence.

As someone who grew up amid heavy industry – downwind from
the Illinois River Valley’s biggest polluters – who was diagnosed with bladder
cancer at 20, who documented, in my 30s, the presence of solvents and other
carcinogens in my hometown drinking-water wells, who became a mother in my 40s,
I highly value clean air and water and am motivated to protect them. I think a
lot of cancer survivors feel that way. What I didn’t expect – as a first-time
civil disobedient – was how well prepared I was for jail by my prior experience
as a cancer patient. As far as I can see, if you’ve ever spent time in a
hospital, tethered to a catheter tube, you have all the skills you need to cope
with incarceration.

Hospital:Bad food;
lights on all night; strip searches; people you’ve never met control your life;
confined to a small space; little access to daylight; delayed response to
call-button request; annoying television in the background; ice chips.

Jail: Ditto, minus
the call button.

Basically, if you can be a cancer patient, you can be an
inmate. Have you ever walked down a hospital corridor pushing an IV stand with
one hand while trying to hold shut your backless, blue gown with the other? If
so, you will have no trouble with ankle chains and an orange jumpsuit. Have you
ever laid alone on an examination table with your feet in the stirrups, prepped
and draped, waiting endlessly for the doctor to finish up with the previous
patient and walk through the damned door? If so, then you will know how to
occupy your mind while handcuffed to a wall while the officer finishes booking
the inmate in the next room.

I say all this because there is a great need, at this
historical moment, for citizens in general and cancer patients in specific to vigorously
insert themselves into the political process. I’m not calling you to unlawful
behavior. Civil disobedience is a highly personal decision and, for me, came as
an individual act of conscience – but I do contend that there is more to fear
from our inaction than from the consequences of our actions.

After two decades of researching, writing, speaking, and
submitting expert testimony as a biologist on the role of chemical carcinogens,
endocrine disruptors, and developmental toxicants in an attempt to bring about
toxic chemical reform, I have to admit that very little has changed. Now I am
watching the fracking boom – which uses and releases chemical carcinogens,
endocrine disruptors, and developmental toxicants and enjoys exemptions from
most of our federal environmental laws – undo what little progress we have made
and hurtle us further down the road toward the catastrophe of climate change.

Here is what I am now convinced of: the oil, gas, and coal
industries – and all the hydrocarbon carcinogens they produce and release –
will not be dismantled by good data alone.

And here, from cell block D, are my recent observations:
having been arrested three days prior to a cancer checkup, the latter, while
deeply familiar, was far more frightening than the former. The images from my
2013 fingerprinting were far less terrifying than those from my 1995
colonoscopy. And lying motionless for 45 minutes in an MRI tube is a bigger
ordeal than five days in 24-hour lockup. In a jail cell, you can reacquaint
yourself with the bible, you can do pushups, you can think.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Sandra wrote this piece -- as she is doing for all her
pieces from jail -- on scraps of paper with stubs of pencil, from her head.
Nothing else.

April 22, 2013

TO: FRED KRUPP, Environmental Defense Fund

FRANCES BEINECKE, Natural Resource Defense Council

MICHAEL BRUNE, Sierra Club

PHILIP JOHNSON, Heinz Endowments, and

Other fellow leaders in the environmental community:

While confined in the Chemung County Jail, here in the
southern tier of upstate New York, I have had to think deeply and long about the
environmental community’s response to the boom in natural gas extraction from
shale via hydraulic fracking, which is now sweeping the nation, from west to
east. I write to share with you my insights regarding the split within our
community over whether to embrace a regulatory approach to fracking, or to
press for bans and moratoria.

I’ll begin by explaining why I am in jail. Last month, on
the west shore of Seneca Lake, I stood with other local residents on a driveway
owned by Inergy, LLC.

In so doing, we blockaded a gas compressor station site and
prevented a company truck, carrying a drill head in its truck bed, from going
where that truck wanted to go. When we refused to disband, we were arrested and
charged with trespassing. When three of us further refused, at our arraignment
on April 17th, to pay the resulting fine, we were each sentenced to 15 days in
jail. I am writing to you on day 6 of my incarceration.

As the nation’s largest energy storage and transportation
company, Inergy provides the infrastructure for fracking – including within
states like New York, where high-volume, horizontal fracking is not allowed.
Missouri-based Inergy has purchased more than 500 acres of lakeshore property
along the banks of our state’s largest and deepest lake. Seneca Lake is so
large and deep that it creates its own temperature stabilizing microclimate,
which provides the necessary ecological conditions for our state’s world-class
Riesling grapes. Wineries flourish on the hillsides about both banks of the Finger
Lake. Inergy is interested in neither the wine grapes nor our unique climate.
It does not care about Seneca Lake’s designation as the Lake Trout Capital of
the world, nor the tranquil views that draw tourists and fill summer cottages.
Nor, more basically, with the fact that Seneca Lake is the drinking water
source for 100,000 people.

Inergy’s interest is, instead, focused on the landscape
below the surface – namely the abandoned caverns left over from a century of
solution salt mining that lie 1,500 feet beneath and beside the lake shore.
Inergy’s plan is to repurpose these salt caverns to serve as storage for
billions of barrels of fracked gases, which will be brought to Seneca Lake by
rail and by truck from other states. However, these fuels will not be stored in
barrels. The caverns themselves will serve as the receptacle for the
pressurized, liquefied, explosive gases.

The Seneca Lake 12 – as we arrestees call ourselves – fear
that Inergy’s planned storage facilities pose serious risks, including calamitous
ones. As journalist Peter Mantius reports in DC Bureau, salt caverns
represented only 7 per cent of the nation’s 407 underground storage sites for
gas in 2002, but, between 1972 and 2004, they were responsible for all ten
catastrophic accidents involving gas storage. In Belle Rose, Louisiana, the
14-acre sinkhole that is now making headlines was caused by the collapse of a
gas-filled salt cavern. As a result, surface and groundwater have been
contaminated,and an entire community faces relocation.

In addition to the risk for outright catastrophe, we Seneca
Lake 12 object to the heavy industrialization of the pristine Finger Lakes
region that we call home. Along with the 24-hour light pollution from the
industrial lighting of the drill rigs and the 24-hour noise from the
compressors, this facility will fill our scenic highways with fleets of diesel
trucks and send train cars of hazardous, flammable cargo over our rickety rail
trestles. A 60-foot flarestack will send carcinogens and ozone precursors into
our air. (My home is 15 miles downwind; my eleven year old has a history of
asthma.) Our deepest concerns are for the water. Inergy’s hillside pits have
already leaked, salt geysers have already spewed, lake side vegetation has
already died and, in spite of the fact that Inergy’s discharges of effluent
chemicals into the lake have been out of compliance for the past twelve
consecutive quarters, Inergy applied for and received from the State of New
York a permit to discharge 44,000 additional pounds of chloride into the lake.
Every single day.

In a larger way, our act of civil disobedience - for which I
now wear an orange jumpsuit and reside in a six by seven foot cell – is
directed at the practice of shale gas extraction itself. This is why, with our arms
linked, we unfurled a banner with the words, “Our Future is Unfractured.”
Clearly, a massive build-out of fracking’s infrastructure – the storage
facilities; the pipelines, the compressors and condensers; the access roads;
the underground injection wells for the disposal of fracking waste; the
ethylene “crackers” that turn the byproducts of wet gas into ingredients for
the petrochemical industry – is a necessary precondition for fracking to occur.
As it boasts in its communiqués to investors and clients, Inergy intends to
serve the Marcellus shale gas boom by turning the Finger Lakes region into the
Northeast’s storage and transportation hub for the vaporous gases so obtained.
Thus, taking a stand against infrastructure projects that aid and abet fracking
not only draws attention to the public health and environmental harms created
by the projects themselves but also signals objection to fracking and, even
more fundamentally,to the further entrenchment of fossil fuel dependency in a
time of climate emergency.

To this end, there are many fracking infrastructure projects
near my home in upstate New York where I might have chosen to plant my flag as
a first-time civil disobedient. In Horseheads, there is a storage depot for
fracking chemicals headed for the gas fields of Pennsylvania. In Painted Post,
a processing facility for fracking sand. Near the jail where I am housed here
in Elmira, a landfill accepts radioactive drill cuttings from out-of-state
operations. So, why protest at a compressor station site? The answer, for me,
is highly personal. My son Elijah was born in a birth center on a hill
overlooking Seneca Lake, just down the road from the new compressor station.The
west shore of Seneca – where I walked when in labor – is a charmed place for
me. And the burial of explosive hydrocarbon gases beneath it is, for me, a
desecration.

But particulars aside, it’s the generic, cumulative,
systemic and ubiquitous impacts of drilling and fracking operations and their
associated infrastructure projects across the nation that is the first topic I
want to raise with you in this letter.

Fracking, and the multitude of corollary activities that
enable it, is turning this nation inside out. Consider that, by weight, the new
number one commodity sent beyond its borders by the State of Wisconsin – which
does not even engage in fracking – is silica sand. (Prized for its ability to
withstand the lithostatic pressure of the earth without crumbling, grains of
silica sand are shot into the shards of shale during fracking operations in
order to prop the cracks open, so that the oil or gas can flow out of them.) In
other words, Wisconsin is now exporting itself. The sand counties of Aldo
Leopold are being loaded onto barges, trucks, and railcars headed for the
fracking fields of America. Hills, bluffs, coulees: they are all going. Big
parts of formerly rolling Wisconsin are now, thanks to frack sand mining, as
flat as Illinois. In the process, surface water is silted, groundwater is
threatened, and air fills with silica dust – a known lung carcinogen and a
known cause of the disabling disease silicosis. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania,
drilling and fracking operations fragment millions of acres of intact, interior
forests – along with the ecosystem services they provide. Nationally, thanks to
fracking, energy extraction has become the number one land use; the U.S. has
more acreage leased for oil and gas than planted in wheat or soy.

Against this backdrop of epic transformation of the
landscape and mass industrialization of rural America, the policy discussions
about fracking emerging from your respective organizations are remarkably
narrow and conciliatory. Partnering with industry, Environmental Defense Fund
focuses on calculating methane emissions rates from well pads and, together
with the Heinz Endowments, promulgating voluntary standards for fracking based
on “best practices.” The dubious notion of “sustainable shale” aside (by what
definition of “sustain” can any non-renewable fossil fuel be described, let
alone the methane bubbles trapped inside the Marcellus Shale, whose recoverable
reserves have been re-estimated sharply downward by geologists and are now
believed to provide only six years worth of U.S. gas usage), the Center for
Sustainable Shale fails to consider the devastating collateral damage created
by all the corollary activities that necessarily accompany shale gas
extraction: strip-mining for sand, clear cutting of forests, and destruction of
productive farmland are just three. While you consider industry best practices
such as green completion, recycling of fracking fluid, and strict engineering
standards for well casings, you entirely ignore the massive amounts of steel
and cement – miles and miles of it for every well – that must be manufactured,
transported, and entombed in the Earth for the one-time,short-term,
un-recyclable use of shale gas extraction (in the case of the Marcellus Shale,
a one-time use for six years of gas).

Should Governor Cuomo decide to pursue full development of
shale gas via high-volume horizontal hydrofracking, the amount of steel alone
that would be buried in New York State will exceed, by 2.5 times, the entire
tonnage of the U.S. Navy Fleet(as calculated by Cornell engineer Tony
Ingraffea). To my knowledge, no one has estimated the amount of steel and
concrete consumed by the fracking industry on a national basis for use as well
casings and casing strings. Consider, however,that the production of both
materials is fossil-fuel intensive and that, on a worldwide scale, cement
manufacturing alone is responsible for six percent of total greenhouse gas
emissions. Those same resources – and the jobs they provide– could be directed
toward the construction of renewable energy infrastructures and the smart grid
they require.

The advocacy of “sustainable shale” is provincial not only
because it fails to consider radical alterations to land use wrought by
fracking and the costly sacrifice of carbon-intensive resources, but also
because it utterly ignores the ongoing fracking-driven transformation of our
materials economy. Fully 30% of natural gas is used not as a source of domestic
energy but in manufacturing, a big chunk of which is diverted for use in
petrochemical manufacturing. Fully 5% of the world’s natural gas supply is
consumed to make the petrochemical fertilizer anhydrous ammonia. Natural gas is
also the starting point for the manufacture of polyvinyl chloride (PVC
plastic). The “wet gases,” such as ethane, that are blasted out of the ground
with methane are used in the manufacture of other petrochemical plastics. And
these are just a few examples. As you know, the U.S. chemical industry is
experienced a parallel boom in activity as a direct result of cheap, abundant
shale gas.

Accelerated petrochemical manufacture brought on by fracking
has profound environmental and public health consequences. Cheap, abundant
agricultural chemicals undermine the local, organic food movement and keep our
nation’s farm system running onthe pesticide treadmill. Anhydrous ammonia
fertilizer is responsible for the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the
destruction of aquatic ecosystems throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and
contamination of groundwater aquifers throughout rural America. Last Thursday’s
deadly explosion at the West Fertilizer Company in Texas – which destroyed
lives and homes across a vast swath of land – reveals the inherent dangers of
relying on volatile petrochemicals as a source of agricultural nitrogen. Once
again: natural gas is the starting point for anhydrous ammonia manufacture (say
what you will about downsides of sustainable agriculture, but green manure,
compost tea, and crop rotation never blew up a nursing home). In sum, the
fracking boom – whether regulated or unregulated, guided by best practices or
worst – further deepens the dependency of our nation’s food system on
non-renewable fossil fuels at precisely the moment when we desperately need to
be calling for its emancipation. In this, natural gas is not a bridge but a
perilous detour.

Likewise in chemical manufacturing, fracking, by making
petrochemicals cheaper and more abundant, undoes gains in toxic chemical
reform, green chemistry, and green engineering.The plastics that will be
created by a proposed new cracker facility in Pittsburgh from the wet gases of
fracking solve a waste disposal problem of the energy industry – and make
fracking more profitable – but, at the same time, add to the burden of
unbiodegradable materials that we are, as individual citizens, encouraged to
reduce, reuse, and recycle. Inevitably, much of this fracked plastic will end
up in the oceans, adding to garbage patches and contaminating aquatic food
chains. Meanwhile the cracking facility itself will add ground-level ozone
(smog) to a Pennsylvania community already in non-attainment for ozone, and
thus add to the community’s burden of asthma, heart attack, stroke, and preterm
birth. How is this sustainable?

In my home state of Illinois – where no fracking is
currently occurring – the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council has
joined hands with industry to draft model regulations for fracking (which are
not as strict as those that we rejected in New York). The Sierra Club’s
subsequent endorsement of the fracking regulatory bill now under consideration
by the State legislature has allowed pro-fracking forces in both government and
industry to claim that Sierra Club has endorsed regulated fracking. In separate
conversations this year with both Frances Beineke of NRDC and Michael Brune of
Sierra Club, I was told that a nation-wide ban on fracking – or even moratoria
in all states – would be “unrealistic” for political reasons. What seems to me
less realistic – politically – is to imagine that the oil and gas industry,
which has already exempted itself from federal laws and surrounds itself with
secrecy, would willfully follow any regulations or voluntary standards of any
kind. Ironically, the very states that are most vulnerable to fracking for
reasons of economic desperation are those least able, because of massive budget
cuts, to enforce regulations and provide oversight for an industry whose wells
and infrastructure will be distributed across the landscape.

Meanwhile, land in Missouri and up and down the Illinois
River is being readied for sand stripmining in anticipation of fracking’s debut
in Illinois, and the Shaunee National Forest, a haven of biodiversity, in
southern Illinois, is being opened for drilling activity. The results will
neither be sustainable nor regulatable.

With fracking, the mainstream environmental community has
lost its way, aligning itself with those who believe that now is not the time
to embrace renewable energy and declare the fossil fuel party over.

The voices that cry “wait” and capitulate to powerful
industry forces through their willingness to trade one fossil fuel for another
are taking us down a perilous path. It is time to say now – grassroots groups
and big green groups together – that the unholy trinity of coal, oil and gas is
part of a ruinous past and; that further investments in new techniques to blast
these deadly fossils from the bedrock are a waste of time, money, water, air,
trees, health and farmland; and that well-intentioned attempts to regulate and
police the resulting mess is a waste of human ingenuity that could be better
spent re-imagining and retooling our economy and our culture for the
post-carbon age.We don’t need to design
filters for cigarettes – they provide only false assurances of safety and only
delay the initiation of entirely new habits and attitudes. Because I have now
run out of paper –

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Yesterday was Earth Day. The forsythia finally bloomed. The
squirrels raided the birdfeeder and deer raided my hosta garden. And while I
went out for a walk with my camera, environmental activist Sandra Steingraber
spent the day reflecting. Because, as you may remember, she was arrested for
trespass during a protest of Inergy’s gas storage facility on Senaca Lake and
has been spending her nights at the Chemung County Jail.

Sandra is a passionate
advocate for protecting the earth for our children and their children. This is
the second letter she sent from the Chemung County Jail.

April 19, 2013

“Why I am in Jail on Earth Day”

This morning – I have no idea what time this morning, as
there are no clocks in jail, and the florescent lights are on all night long –
I heard the familiar chirping of English sparrows and the liquid notes of a
cardinal. And there seemed to be another bird too – one who sang a burbling
tune. Not a robin–wren? The buzzing, banging, clanking of jail and the growled
announcements of guards on their two-way radios – which also go on all night –
drowned it out. But the world, I knew, was out there somewhere.

The best way to deal with jail is to exude patience, and
wrap it around a core of resolve and surrender. According to New York state law,
all inmates upon arrival are isolated from the general population until they
are tested for tuberculosis and that test comes back negative. Typically, that
takes three days. Isolation means you are locked inside your cell with no
access to the phone (the phone for cell block D happens to be located,
tantalizingly, four feet from my bars - just out of reach); no access to books
(the two books I have in my cell, lent to me by an empathetic inmate, are the
Bible and Nora Roberts’ Carolina Moon, which is a 470-page paperback whose
opening sentence is, “She woke in the body of a dead friend.”); and, of course,
no access to wi fi, cell phones, e-mail or the internet.

I am writing with a borrowed pencil on the back of the
“Chemung County Inmate Request Form,” which is a half sheet of paper. I am
writing small and revising in my head. (Forgive the paragraphing – I’m trying
to save space.)

Yesterday, I was told that no medical personnel were
available to administer my TB test. When I was called down to the nurse this
morning, she asked why I didn’t have my TB test yesterday. Of course, she was
available yesterday. The resulting delay means that I will join the prison
population and be released from 24 hour lock-down on Monday, rather than
Sunday.

Frustration will be counter-productive and place me closer
to despair. Let–it–go surrender, ironically, keeps me in touch with my resolve.

So, Monday, which is Earth Day, I will emerge from my cell
and join the ecosystem of the Chemung County Jail, where the women’s voices are
loud and defiant. Stingray (not her actual nickname), broke a tooth yesterday.
When she showed it to officer Murphy’s Law (that’s his actual nickname) and
said, “the other half is in my cell,” Murphy’s Law replied, “So, you think the
tooth fairy’s going to come?” And then he left.

But she stood at the iron door and called for pain meds,
over and over in a voice that I use for rally speeches. Full oration.
Projecting to the rafters. Stingray is six months pregnant.

She got her pain meds.

Stingray is my inspiration. How can I use my time here –
separated from the whole human race by the layers of steel and concrete – to
speak loudly and defiantly about the business plans of a company called Inergy
that seeks to turn my Finger Lakes home into a transportation and storage hub
for fossil fuel gases? It is wrong to compress and bury explosive gases in salt
caverns beside and beneath a lake – Seneca – that serves as a source of
drinking water for 100,000 people. It is wrong to construct a flare stack on
the banks of this lake, which will contribute hazardous air pollutants,
including death-dealing ozone, into the air. It is wrong for DEC and EPA and
FERC to turn a blind eye to a company that has, for the last 12 quarters,
exceeded its permitted discharge of chemicals into this lake. It is wrong for a
company to claim that basic geological knowledge about the bedrock itself, is a
proprietary trade secret and hide it from the public and from the scientific
community. It is wrong to deepen our dependency on fossil fuels in a time of
climate emergency.

I could express these ideas more eloquently if there were
coffee in jail. There is not.

I was led to cell #1 in block D of the Chemung County jail
by three things. One is the decision of Inergy to industrialize the Finger
Lakes region where I live and, in so doing, aid and abet the fracking industry
by erecting a massive storage depot near the birthplace of my son. I consider
this an act of desecration. That’s what biologists call the proximate cause of
my decision to commit an act of trespass by blockading the Inergy’s compressor
station driveway.

The ultimate cause is a commentary published last fall in
the journal that all biologists read – Nature – by Jeremy Grantham, who is not
a scientist, but an economist. (www.nature.com/uidfinder/10.1038/491303a) He
noted that all the projections for climate change – even the worst case
scenarios – were being overtaken by real-life data. In other words, our climate
situation is worse than we thought – even when we assumed the worst. Mr.
Grantham then exhorted scientists who have this knowledge to be bold – noting
that no one is paying attention to this data: “Be persuasive, be bold, be
arrested (if necessary).”

So, here I am, ringing the alarm bell from my isolation cell
on Earth Day. May my voice be as un-ignorable as Stingray’s.

The third reason is this one: seven years ago, when my son
was four years old, he asked to be a polar bear for Halloween, and so I went to
work sewing him a costume from a chenille bedspread. It was with the knowledge
that the costume would almost certainly outlast the species. Out on the street
that night – holding a plastic pumpkin will with KitKat bars – I saw many
species heading towards extinction; children dressed as frogs, bees, monarch
butterflies, and the icon of Halloween itself – the little brown bat.

The kinship that children feel for animals and their ongoing
disappearance from us literally brought me to my knees that night, on a
sidewalk in my own village. It was love that got me back up. It was love that
brought me to this jail cell.

My children need a world with pollinators and plankton
stocks and a stable climate. They need lake shores that do not have explosive
hydrocarbon gases buried underneath.

The fossil fuel party must come to an end. I am shouting at
an iron door. Can you hear me now?